Controlled Personal Data Stream in Mobile Personal Sensing

SYS 2 Controlled Personal Data Stream in Mobile Personal Sensing Min Mun, Shuai Hao, Nilesh Mishra, Katie Shilton, Jeff Burke, Mark Hansen, Ramesh Govindan, Deborah Estrin Mobile Personal Sensing (MPS) is a new kind of participatory sensing where individuals and communities use mobile phones and web-based services to collect and analyze data for use in discovery. While MPS enables people to participate in sensing and analyzing aspects of their lives that were previously invisible, it introduces some constraints due to the inherently intimate nature of the data captured with MPS, which results in concerns for protecting individual privacy, for personal data stream ownership, and for visibility into the web of processing that is used to contextualize and interpret the data. We propose to develop a Personal Data Vault (PDV), a privacy architecture allowing people to control over their data flows over time, with emphasis on controlling the granularities of location data. In addition, we suggest a new method to allow users to use less-granular data for the applications requiring exact location information by partitioning the applications.